India too dumb for artificial intelligence?

By Anjana Menon Machines are having a go at human intelligence. Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) program, AlphaGo, recently beat the human European champion of the ancient Chinese board game Go, which has more permutations than there are atoms in the universe. It was 5-0 win for the machine. We know now that AI is far more developed than acknowledged and will be upon us sooner than we imagine. India and its $146-billion software industry is mostly unprepared for the shift and its workforce vastly underskilled. AlphaGo’s feat advances the progress of AI a decade ahead of what even physicists such as Stephen Hawking had predicted. Go, played with an equal number of black-and-white pebbles on a grid, opens 250 possibilities per move, and then another 250 and so on, until…